USB-IF Slaps Palm In iTunes Spat

An anonymous reader writes "The USB Implementers Forum has finally responded to Palm's complaints that Apple is violating its USB-IF Membership Agreement by preventing the Pre from syncing with iTunes. It's found in favor of Apple. Worse, it's accused Palm itself of violating the Membership Agreement by using Apple's Vendor ID number to disguise the Pre as an Apple device."

Letter to FDA

[MBCook]

Dear FDA,

We here at Bob's Atrocious Dealings are having a problem and require your help.

As you may know, Neodyne Inexpensive Care-taking Equipment gives away free diabetes test strips as an incentive to get people to buy their Glucodex 1726 Blood Glucose Meter. These strips are coded to only work with their meter.

We here at B.A.D. sell a competing meter, the Blud-O-Matic 666, which has been designed to use their free strips by pretending to be their meter.

Now you may not have known about our device, as we didn't submit it to you for review. You approved our previous product, the Seth's-Audi-Scope 1996, so we figured you'd be good.

Now our customers, who use the free strips that N.I.C.E. provides their users, are having problems since they keep changing the way their meter works. This is causing us problems, and our confused customers aren't even asking us for support sometimes since they think it's N.I.C.E.'s fault.

FDA, please slap down N.I.C.E. for hampering competition by making it hard for us to profit off their hard work by deliberately changing their strips to fail with our unregistered, uncertified meter. It's confusing our customers that one of the features we trumpet in all our marketing keeps breaking.

Sincerely,
Edward Vi Lancelot

Re:This doesn't sound unreasonable to me.

[devaldez]

Well said. Moreover, for those of us who have dealt with hardware piracy, Device and Vendor IDs are critical identification tools, not only to ensure that OUR software runs correctly, but it's one other way to identify pirated hardware. Most pirates aren't smart enough to use the correct information in the flash. Heck it was so important 10 years ago that Microsoft used Windows Update to enforce four-field enforcement on PCI devices. Instead of using two-field matching, that allowed, say, Asus motherboards to coat-tail on Intel drivers, Windows Update required four-field matching (Vendor ID, Device ID, Subvendor ID, subdevice ID). While it added an additional layer of validation cost, Microsoft did it because of the problems with incompatible drivers, not piracy. Also, in the PCI world, falsifying IDs is just as critical as in the USB world.

My main concern is that the purpose of these IDs is to ensure compatibility, which Apple can, in no way, guarantee with the Pre. Had Palm asked and entered into an arrangement, they might've had the opportunity to do it right. It's also true that Apple has no legal requirement to facilitate the functionality and no MORAL obligation, for that matter. The way Palm went about the Pre indicates that no matter how revolutionary the OS is (and it IS), it will be marginalized for both consumers AND business. Palm has developed a pattern on the Pre of half-assing things that actually MATTER (ActiveSync security, anyone?).

iTunes?

[Elwar123]

Ok, maybe I've completely missed the boat her but...I still don't understand the whole iTunes hystaria... Why pay for proprietary formats of music that you can only play on certain devices? My Palm Pre plays MP3s, why would I want to go out of my way to make it sync up with something that requires me to pay for music? I had the iPhone for a while, I never used the iTunes thing. I never saw any reason, and I could never figure out how to get it to play MP3s. The Palm Pre you just hook up to the computer and drag your MP3s over to the music folder. Plus you can ssh into your Palm Pre and manipulate the Linux files. The only thing I miss from the iPhone is the ease of use of the voicemail. I also get a buttload of free apps on the Pre.

Code version of this forum

[BlueBoxSW.com]

10 Print "Palm spoofed the id's. What's wrong with that"
20 Print "You can't spoof ID's in a standard like that"
30 Print "Apple created a closed system yet claims it's open. Those Bastards"
40 Print "It is open, there are lots of hooks in"
50 Print "Then why won't they let Palm Play ball?"
60 Goto 10